Company history

The company began in June 1988 in Midori Ward, Nagoya, as Toyo Shoji — and its stated purpose named two businesses that had nothing to do with each other: selling steel-making raw materials, and selling pachinko machines. Yamamoto Hidetoshi, then in his early thirties and a graduate of Meijo University’s engineering faculty, ran both at once for some thirteen years. The steel side was industrial-goods trading, a business of reading procurement costs and accumulating relationships with a fixed roster of customers; the machine side was consumer-facing, moving product from manufacturers to pachinko parlors. The pairing drilled him in the discipline of the one and the market sense of the other.

Through the 1990s the pachinko industry was becoming an equipment industry: the 1992 deregulation of CR machines, licensed tie-in titles, suburban parlors rolling out nationwide. The standard supply chain ran manufacturer → distributor → hall, and Toyo Shoji built its position in that middle layer from its Nagoya base outward. It took ISO 9002 certification for the sales division in January 1999, preparing to become a national distributor rather than a regional one.

By 2000 Yamamoto had a voice in the industry. Lecturing that July on parlor management strategy for the coming century, he argued that as machines competed more on gameplay the development gap between makers would widen, forcing smaller firms into alliances — and predicted tie-ups across genres, pachislot makers with pachinko makers, pachinko makers with the games industry (遊技通信, August 2000). The route Fields would later take, building a business on borrowed and then owned intellectual property across industry lines, was already the view he was stating in public.

In October 2001 the company split itself in two. The steel-materials operations were spun into a new entity that kept the old name, and the parent — renamed Fields Corporation and moved from Nagoya to Minato Ward, Tokyo — was left as a pure pachinko machine distributor. Thirteen years after founding, Yamamoto discarded one of his two original pillars. The move to Tokyo followed the trade: dealings between the large machine makers and their distributors were concentrated in the capital. Renaming, relocation and demerger were executed inside a single year, and 2001 became the company’s strategic watershed.

The name was the thesis. Fields — a place, a domain — described a distribution platform sitting between many manufacturers and many halls rather than a firm with a product of its own. Acquisitions of regional distributors followed from 2002, and an IT subsidiary set up in January 2003 pushed the company past pure logistics toward supporting the development of the machines themselves. In March 2003, about fifteen years after founding, Fields listed on JASDAQ.

Scale came from signing the makers. A basic sales agreement with the SANKYO group’s Daido (now Bisty) followed in November 2003; a public share offering in June 2004 raised paid-in capital to $73.5M (¥8bn); the head office moved to Shibuya in July 2004. That same year Fields began selling Evangelion-series machines — its first real experience of pairing an anime property with a pachinko cabinet. A joint venture with the Kyoraku group in February 2008 and a supply agreement with Capcom’s Enterrise in November 2009 completed a national platform fed by several of the major manufacturers.

In April 2010 Fields acquired Tsuburaya Productions, the special-effects studio founded in 1963 by Tsuburaya Eiji and home to the Ultraman series that began broadcasting in 1966. A machine distributor buying one of Japan’s great character studios struck the industry as incongruous. Yamamoto’s reasoning was scarcity: “there are not many properties on the order of Ultraman,” he later said, and “it takes twenty or thirty years to raise a property — creating a new one is hard.” Rather than build, he bought.

The purchase changed the company’s self-definition from distributor to rights holder. Having borrowed characters for tie-in machines, Fields now controlled the toy, licensing, film and live-event outlets of a franchise itself. A games studio was acquired in 2011, a monthly comics magazine co-launched with Shogakukan Creative that November — a run of moves aimed at internalizing the content value chain around Tsuburaya’s properties.

Then the machine business turned. Yamamoto stepped up to chairman in April 2012 and Oya Takashi became president; revenue climbed to a peak in the year to March 2014 before falling back as parlor play declined and tighter payout rules forced a generational switch of cabinets. Shigematsu Tetsuya, a former Fuji Bank financier who had run corporate planning, took the presidency in April 2016 and made the pivot explicit, describing a business to be driven by intellectual property at its core. The results went the other way: the year to March 2017 produced an operating loss of $48.1M (¥5bn) and a net loss of $111.4M (¥13bn), the worst in the company’s history, with further losses the following year. His two-year tenure demonstrated in the accounts both the limits of the distribution business and the necessity of the IP shift.

On 15 May 2018, after two consecutive years of losses, Yamamoto returned to the presidency eleven years after leaving it — a founder coming back to rebuild the organization himself. He recruited industry veterans onto the board, brought machine development in-house through subsidiary acquisitions, and pushed the IP shift from slogan to structure. The year to March 2020 returned to operating profit; the pandemic collapse of the machine market pulled the following year back into loss; and the year to March 2022 recovered to near the old peak.

On 3 October 2022 the company converted to a holding structure and renamed itself Tsuburaya Fields Holdings, demerging the pachinko business into an operating company that inherited the name Fields. Promoting a subsidiary’s name to the top of the group was the point: it fixed the post-2018 IP shift at the level of the corporate name, while the holding company took charge of IP oversight, group strategy and finance. The business that earned close to nine-tenths of revenue was given the subsidiary’s signboard; the business earning about a tenth supplied the group’s.

The other half of the strategy ran the opposite way. In March 2024 the group bought Sophia, a machine maker founded in 1951 and known for the NISHIJIN brand, and with it Ace Denken, long the leading supplier of the feeder equipment and installation work that make up a parlor’s machine islands — extending what the group sells to the same customers from cabinets to the space around them. Meanwhile the content and digital segment, though only about an eighth the size of the amusement-equipment segment by revenue, contributes disproportionately at the profit line. Management targets operating profit of ¥10 billion for the year to March 2028 with half of it earned overseas, betting on the global expansion of Ultraman around its sixtieth broadcast anniversary in 2026 and on a trading-card business. Yamamoto has named his eldest son, Yamamoto Takeshi, as a successor candidate and moved him into group strategy.